RIP Neil Kulkarni

Stunned, heartbroken, by the news about Neil Kulkarni.

I never met Neil in the flesh but I feel like I did, his personality is so vivid in his writing, and as a social media presence and podcaster. By the time Neil started coming down to Melody Maker from Coventry, I would have been mostly in New York. I did have some lovely phone conversations with him when getting him to review rap records for Spin (his opinions annoyed some of my staider colleagues - mission accomplished!). But mostly I know him through his writing and his presence on Facebook, where he'd be chatting about the stuff of everyday life as much as music ( he was enormously knowledgeable and opinionated about crisps, for instance! And one of his last tweets was a photo he took of a large Swiss roll someone mysteriously left on a stairwell banister). 

As a music writer, Neil Kulkarni is one of the greats - the kind of stylist and personality born for (and born in) the UK’s weekly music press. Like many readers I expect, my favorite Neil mode was the rant – these were things of great rhythmic beauty, deadly in their accuracy - incendiary devices that incensed their deserving targets. The energy he could transmit through words was extraordinary. But Neil wrote in many other modes beyond the polemical and shouty -  ruminative and tender, for instance, in the pieces for The Quietus that evolved into Eastern Spring: a 2nd Gen Memoir, his 2012 book for Zer0. 

"Life force" is a phrase I keep seeing in tributes. I so wish I’d felt the heat of it up close and in person, but it blazed through his writing. It seems inconceivable that this fire has been extinguished, way too early.  The world feels colder today. 

My heart goes out to Neil's daughters, partner, and family;  his friends;  his colleagues past and present;  his bandmates;  his students;  and his fans and readers.

Close friend and fellow Chart Music podcaster David Stubbs has started a Go-Fund Me for Neil's children. 

Neil aged 18 going on 19, in 1991, just before starting to write for Melody Maker.

Tributes from his friends and editors and colleagues are too numerous to list here, but here's a few to start with

Simon Price meets the moment with this loving portrait at The Quietus

Derek Walmsley, who worked with Neil at the Wire, remembers him at his blog Slow Motion

Chart Music's mainman Al Needham 

Carl Loben at DJ

David Stubbs at Electronic Sound

Ian King at Unexpected Delirium on NK and loss in the age of parasocial media

In the coming week, I will pull together some of Neil's pieces for a post on Pantheon. Here's a couple that already appeared.